A Professional Journey

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Monthly Archives: April 2013

My grandfather died during my senior year of high school. He did not have much to leave behind, but what he did have he tried to spread evenly among us grandkids – American Airlines stock (oy vey). Back in 2001 each stock was worth $1, at one point the value dropped to $0.51 and with the recent merger (US Airways) it jumped up to $4.89. Over a 12 year period my mediocre piece of stock became useless, but eventually became something worth holding on to. It made me wonder… if my work and life experience was printed on a piece of paper and given a stock value, what would that dollar amount be, and what would my highs and lows look like?

What would I be worth to employers or investors looking to trade me? How do I figure out that value? It is very amusing to Google the phrase “What am I worth?” I came across a website called Human For Sale that invites you to take a quiz providing a monetary result for your net worth. It’s a total fishing site, so I don’t recommend using it. I took the dumb risk to find out that my net worth is $1,976,120, which is pretty cool, I guess.

My value in the market place comes from my life experiences. Here is a list of some of the random highlights since age 18:

Like this:

It is so hard for some people spread the wealth of work that needs to be done. Throughout my years working for an array of personalities I have definitely been micromanaged. At the time it was hard for me to understand why anyone would do that, but in retrospect I see that those people had issues with trust and working on a team.

One supervisor comes to mind – she was smart and driven, but always questioned her role and power in the organization. I loved working on the team and always trusted that everyone was trying to create something great. Yes, of course there was the occasional lazy bones who didn’t pull his weight; but the rest of us always picked up the slack – that is what a team does. She wanted great results as I did, but her approach was so very different. I did not like being told what to do, especially in such a condescending way. I kept asking myself, “why was I hired if she can do it all?” Oh did we butt heads sometimes, but I learned how to compromise with her. I also learned the importance of real team work and what that looks like.

My Takeaway

I thrive off of the team – the energy, focus, creativity, and of course the balance of the work load. Finding a leader who understands and respects the importance of trusting the team is often difficult. If I was put into a leadership 5 years ago, then I probably would have made the same mistakes with my team. Life experience has taught me that while one must closely watch your team, you must also trust those you depend upon – they were hired for a reason